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The ATI R600g Driver Gets Boosted By A New Design

09-29-2010, 04:50 AM

Phoronix: The ATI R600g Driver Gets Boosted By A New Design

We've said it a few times already that the R600g driver continues to advance, but this open-source Gallium3D graphics driver that provides hardware acceleration for ATI R600/R700/Evergreen ASICs (the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 graphics cards) has now received another huge boost with what has been dubbed as the "new design" and with the latest Mesa Git code these new code paths are used by default...

Comment

Could you make a article about all the graphic stack?
I'm almost sure I'm not the only one in this situation, but even if I have a strong knowledge in development, I'm not familiar with all the "Mesa", "Gallium", "Stack", "R{300,600}", R{300,600}g", "HD 2000/3000/4000/5000", "ASIC", the name of the proprietary drivers and the open-sourced ones, the state of all the open-sourced drivers and, eventually, what are the links between all of these?

I'm sure you're one of the best person to explain this and I'm sure it will help us to understand how important a news is.

Thanks,
Creak

Comment

Could you make a article about all the graphic stack?
I'm almost sure I'm not the only one in this situation, but even if I have a strong knowledge in development, I'm not familiar with all the "Mesa", "Gallium", "Stack", "R{300,600}", R{300,600}g", "HD 2000/3000/4000/5000", "ASIC", the name of the proprietary drivers and the open-sourced ones, the state of all the open-sourced drivers and, eventually, what are the links between all of these?

I'm sure you're one of the best person to explain this and I'm sure it will help us to understand how important a news is.

Thanks,
Creak

These terms are explained again and again in the articles and the forum. Please search there, and do not make Michael to explain the same things over 6 months.

Comment

I'm not familiar with all the "Mesa", "Gallium", "Stack", "R{300,600}", R{300,600}g", "HD 2000/3000/4000/5000", "ASIC", the name of the proprietary drivers and the open-sourced ones, the state of all the open-sourced drivers and, eventually, what are the links between all of these?

I'll do it:

Mesa is the free software 3D graphics rendering API that should work like OpenGL.

Gallium3D is the new free software graphics driver architecture developped by the Tungsten Graphics guys who now work at VMWare. It is needed to have this architecture for modern, shader based graphics cards and to keep the amount of work that needs to be done to get to a minimum level of support as low as possible.

Stack reffers to a couple of drivers. There is no such thing as 'One driver to rules them all'. On Windows you also don't install one graphics driver, but a set/stack of drivers, even though you just download what seems to be one driver. You have a DirectX driver, an OpenGL driver, a 2D driver, a video playtback driver, etc.

R300c, R300g, R600c, R600g are just names for GPU drivers. 'R' stands for Radeon, '300/600/700' or whatever number stands for the GPU architecture (for example the ATI Radeon 9800 pro has a 350 core). 'c' stands for Mesa Classic (the old driver architecture) and 'g' stands for Gallium3D (the new driver architecture).

Comment

Drago, I don't read the forum very often. I know, my mistake, but I don't have the time to filter the interesting posts in the 10 pages of each news. If so much people ask for explanations, maybe it's better to create a glossary instead...